by Paul Pen
There was a frantic exchange of looks in the bedroom. Mom leapt to my side. She wanted to cover my eyes, in a useless attempt to prolong the lie, but I resisted, shaking my head. My sister took advantage of my father’s confusion to pounce on the wardrobe. He grabbed her by the wrists, and with a turn, held her arms from behind like a straitjacket.
“Don’t look so scared,” said my sister. “The kid already knows how my face is. He knows you make me wear the mask because you can’t bear the fact that the fire didn’t affect me.”
“And does he know why it didn’t affect you?” Dad asked.
She didn’t answer. She turned to me.
“What’ve they told you?” She held her chin high to alleviate the pressure Dad was exerting on her body. “That they did everything for your own good?”
I didn’t know how to reply.
“It was the best thing we could do,” Mom murmured.
“The best?” The smile she tried to feign ended up turning into a grimace of pain. “Well, look what you’ve achieved.”
My sister fixed her eyes on me. Then she aimed them around the room. The whole basement.
“We’ve managed to stay together,” Dad whispered into her ear. “We’ve given your two brothers the family that you wanted to destroy.”
“And now that Grandpa’s dying, that’s when you want the boy to go.”
“Grandpa isn’t going to die,” Grandma let out in a sob of denial.
Dad’s arms tightened like a noose around my sister’s neck, making her go quiet. But the words she’d gotten out were enough for me to realize something.
“You knew?” I asked her. “You knew they were going to let me leave?”
She blinked through the mass of tangled hair that covered her face. Her eyelids looked like flies trapped in a spider’s web. She moved her mouth but didn’t answer.
“Sure she knew,” said Dad. “We made the decision when the baby was born. Even before Grandpa came down to tell us what was wrong with him.”
The night when I saw the Cricket Man in the basement. When I peed myself hiding in the corner of the living room.
“That just forced us to try to speed up the process,” Dad went on. “But it seems like your sister was trying to get in ahead of us.”
“You knew,” I repeated to my sister. This time it was no longer a question.
“She was using you to get word out about the basement,” Dad added.
I held a hand to my mouth.
“Nobody can know we’re here,” said Grandma.
“But she told me you could keep living here in the basement—” I broke off midsentence when I realized that I was going to repeat my sister’s words. Words that had to be false. Just like everything that she’d told me about the Cricket Man. She’d pushed me to carry on with the escape plan without telling me who he really was, even though she knew how scared I was to face him.
I looked at my sister, my eyes filled with the tears of another betrayal.
She squirmed in my father’s arms.
“Their lies are much worse!” she screamed. She fought to escape the pincers that held her. I noticed she was focusing her efforts on freeing her right hand. Then suddenly she was still. She spat out some hair that had gone in her mouth. One of her smiles that weren’t happy appeared on her face.
“You know what Dad’s capable of doing,” she said.
“What I’m capable of doing?” he asked. “What’re you talking about?”
I knew what she was talking about. The night I spent in the bathtub. The scratches I discovered on his back when I spied on him from behind the curtain.
My sister flung her bare legs into the air. She unbalanced Dad. She kicked like she had on the kitchen table the night she gave birth to the baby. She stamped on my father’s feet with her heels, and caught one of the arms that gripped her in her mouth and bit it. My father fought to control the raging insect that my sister had turned into. The two of them fell to the floor, coming away from the wardrobe door.
She fixed a dark look on me.
“You know what he’s capable of doing,” she said again.
I remembered the tear that I’d seen behind her mask that night.
I took a step toward the wardrobe.
“Run!” she screamed. “They’re not going to let you leave! They have to cover for Dad! Get out of this basement and tell everyone what’s happening down here.”
Dad crushed my sister with all his body weight. He squeezed her face between his hands. The veins in his forearms swelled. I saw my sister trying to regain control of her right hand, but Dad trapped the arm under his knee.
“What have you told him?” he spat through his teeth. Their noses were almost touching.
When I took another step toward the wardrobe, Mom took me by the shoulder.
“Fight!” my sister screamed, her lungs crushed. “They’re not going to let you go!”
“We are going to let you leave,” Mom said.
“Then prove it to him,” she whispered. “Let him go right now.”
I shook my arm.
I waited for Mom to let go of me so I could leave.
But what she did was press harder with her fingers.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t let you go like this.” She pulled me toward her.
I was going to stay in the basement forever.
I fought for my freedom by shaking my body with all my strength. My mother gave me a slap to control me. She scratched my face with those fingernails she nibbled, sculpting them into little saws. I felt the warm bumps they left across my cheek.
And that was when I discovered the biggest lie my sister had told me.
I stopped struggling with Mom.
I looked at my sister’s eyes hidden behind locks of hair, her head pressed against the floor.
“You lied to me about Dad,” I said.
Her eyes, sunk into her face wet with sweat, pulsed with rage.
“Go, now . . .” Her words whistled in her throat. “Or you’ll never get out . . .”
“You lied to me about Dad,” I repeated. “The night I spent in the bathtub. You told me you’d gone to the bathroom to wash because of Dad. That you’d made the scratches on his back. But you were quiet for a long time before telling me. And you did this with one of your nails.” I copied the gesture she’d made on her bed, running her thumb over the curve of her fingernails, before resting them on my back and admitting that Dad tried to put babies in her belly.
“What a clever boy you are,” my sister whispered, struggling to breathe.
“Mom’s nails are much scratchier,” I went on. “Because she bites them. They’re like little saws.” I pointed at the scratches they’d just made on my face. “Dad didn’t do anything to you that night. And your nose didn’t bleed because of him. It bled from the poison. I read it on the box. That night, you came into the bathroom to wash off the poison. You’d put it on your breast like you did later. That’s why the baby wouldn’t wake up the next day.”
“What’s he talking about!” Dad sprayed my sister’s face with saliva. The veins in his neck swelled even more than the ones in his forearms.
A deep groan escaped from the depths of her stomach.
Mom knelt in front of me.
“What has she told you?” she asked. She used her stretched T-shirt to dry my eyes.
“She told me Dad put the baby in her belly.”
Grandma cried when she heard that.
“You wouldn’t dare!” my father yelled at his daughter.
My sister’s profile lifted above the puddle that her hair had formed on the floor. She smiled at him. “You really think I wouldn’t?”
Dad’s hands shot to her neck. He squeezed them to keep her from saying another word. He didn’t let up until Grandpa told him to stop.
“Son, your father hasn’t done anything like that,” Mom told me.
“But you and Grandma say the baby’s a sin.” I sucked in snot. “That it was the worst
thing that has happened in this basement.”
“And it was,” she said. “Every day we regret not having stopped it. But not because it was your father.”
I took a deep breath before asking. “Then who was it?”
An earthquake started in the room next door. The trembling advanced down the hall. My brother pounded the metal door, asking to come in. Mom took advantage of his timely appearance to answer.
“The one banging away out there.” A veil of tears blocked out her eyes.
“It’s not good for a family of mammals to have babies among themselves,” I reminded her.
“It’s not good,” she said, “but sometimes it happens.” They were the same words she’d used to explain it to me that time in bed.
“Deep down they think I deserve it,” said my sister in a rattling voice. “That my brother owed it to me for what I did to him when he was little.”
My father’s hands returned to her neck.
“Don’t listen to her,” Mom whispered.
My sister gave me a final look that I didn’t know how to interpret.
Then she closed her eyes.
Her tensed arms relaxed under Dad’s knees. She stretched out the bent legs she was using to try to unbalance him. Her fists opened. Her entire body relaxed like an insect exposed to potassium cyanide. Her head fell to one side.
Dad observed the process with his mouth open.
In total silence.
“Have you . . . ?” asked Grandma.
My sister’s right hand then twisted like a viper, escaping from the knee that Dad had just lifted. It was the same hand she’d tried to free before. I understood why when I recognized the handle that poked out from the frayed waist of her brown skirt. The handle of the knife that Dad had used to imitate the cowboys from the movies one night, stabbing the table between the fingers of his open hand.
“A knife!” I yelled.
She grabbed it before Dad could do anything.
She raised her arm over his back.
“I’m going to get out of this basement!” she screamed.
That instant, Mom separated from me. The firefly jar vanished from between my fingers. I watched her swoop on my sister.
First she stopped the knife that was bearing down on my father.
Then she raised her arm toward the ceiling, the jar held high.
“No!” I cried. But Mom let her arm drop with all its weight.
The firefly lamp smashed on my sister’s face.
Her nose caved in, turning her profile into no more than a right angle. Like they’d always told me it was.
A new mask of hair and blood covered her face.
All the fireflies flew out into the room.
36
It was a while before Mom and Dad arrived back in the room. They’d taken my sister away wrapped in a sheet. My brother, who was still banging on the door when they left, took the chance to slip into the room. Grandpa also brought the baby. While I tried pointlessly to reconstruct the jar, we waited for my parents to return.
“Is she all right?” Grandpa asked them when they came in.
Mom shook her head. Seeing me kneeling by pieces of glass, she crouched beside me.
“Be careful,” she said. She waved her hand between mine to stop my work.
“What are all of these things?” she asked. She felt the floor with her fingertips. “Why were you keeping peas?”
She continued to feel the floor.
“And this tooth? Did you take it from my sewing box?” Among the glass, she found one of the colored pencils that’d been in the jar. She handed it to me.
“This is yours,” she said. She carried on searching the floor. “But this screw’s from Dad’s toolbox. What were you keeping in there?”
“You already know,” I whispered to Mom.
“No, no, I don’t know,” she said. “I thought you had pencils in there, but a screw?”
I gestured at Dad with my head so that she’d understand why I couldn’t speak openly.
“Son, your father’s not the dad he’s been these last few months,” she explained. “Your real father’s the one who had you riding him like a horse in the living room. The one who fetched you your insect book. Do you think he cares about this jar full of stuff?”
I remembered him taking it from my legs just before, when I’d sat on the bed after returning from the tunnel.
“My fireflies,” I said then. “They’re my fireflies.” I could see them flying around the place, though they weren’t glowing because the bedroom light was on. They were perching on the walls and on the bed. They were fluttering around Grandma.
“What fireflies?”
“I had them in the jar,” I said.
“This jar?” Mom showed me the lid.
I nodded.
“Look.” I pointed at one flying over our heads. “They’re everywhere.” I followed the insect’s flight with my eyes. Mom copied me.
“See?” I asked.
“I can’t see anything.”
“There’s another one, there!”
“What’s he talking about?” she asked my father.
Dad came beside us, moving some glass out of the way before resting his knee on the floor. He laid a hand on my shoulder. “Son, there’s nothing here.”
“There. There’re lots of them,” I insisted. “They started coming ages ago. They bring me light from outside.”
Dad picked things up from the floor and then showed me the palm of his hand. There were a few pieces of the gravel that built up in the space between the window and the second wall.
“These fireflies you’re talking about,” Dad began. He shook the contents of his hand. “Are you sure they’re really here? You’ve always loved that photo in your book.” Dad picked up one of the pieces of gravel between his finger and thumb. He moved it around in the air in an irregular line, imitating an insect’s random flying.
“It’s just a stone,” he said. He dropped it.
It rolled along the floor.
I watched the piece of gravel. I remembered how the first firefly had walked over some identical little stones when it came into the basement through the hall window. I examined the remains of the smashed container. I saw Dad’s screw, the same one he’d trod on in the hallway the night the baby took so long to stop crying. The night when the second firefly appeared. Then I noticed the two peas. The ones that fell off my plate when I was having dinner, just before I discovered two more fireflies near the jar. One of them had shown up squashed in my hand one morning. My eyes filled with tears when I saw two of the teeth that I spilled onto the floor when I took them one afternoon from Mom’s sewing box. Because that day another pair of fireflies had appeared.
I examined the floor, my eyes coming to rest on each of the little objects contained in the jar. I didn’t want to count them, because I didn’t want to confirm that there was exactly the same number as there were fireflies in the lamp.
“But don’t cry,” said my mother.
I looked up to the ceiling. I followed the flight of one of the fireflies until it vanished in the air, disappearing in front of my eyes. Like the chick that never existed had disappeared from my hands that night.
Because the fireflies had never existed, either.
I took a deep breath to fill the void I felt in my chest.
Then Grandma spoke.
“I think I know what’s happening,” she said. A smile appeared on her face. “Come here.”
She held out her arms, inviting me to approach her. She stroked my face when she knew that I was in front of her.
“These fireflies that you say you see are like the chick that hatched in our hands,” she explained.
“Huh?”
“I gave you a very special power the night you brought me the egg. I taught you to see things like I have to see them,” she said. She laid a wrinkly finger on my forehead. “Imagining them. And I see you’ve managed to make good use of that power.”
I let ou
t a sigh of wonder.
“There’s no creature more amazing than one that can make its own light,” Grandma went on.
I ran to the light switch at the bedroom door.
I turned it off.
All the fireflies glowed to celebrate the fall of darkness, leaving trails of magical green light in their wake. I swiveled with my arms held wide, traveling all around the room among the intermittent flashes that had been there with me during my last days in the basement.
“What’s their light like?” Grandma asked. “Describe it to me.”
“Green,” I answered.
I took the baby from Grandpa’s arms.
“It’s the fireflies,” I whispered to his little face. “Look at them glow. They slept with you one night.”
My nephew held out his arms. He opened and closed his hands in the air. As if he wanted to catch the lights that floated above him.
Grandma got up.
She left the room.
She returned a few seconds later.
“Here,” she said. “Get them back.” She gave me a new glass jar, while she took the baby.
I leapt onto the bed with the jar open.
I held it up.
“Come back,” I said. The fireflies swirled in a cloud of light, a galaxy of flashes, before returning to the container by themselves.
“Is that all of them?” asked Grandma.
I confirmed it was, closing the lid.
There was silence.
“So,” Dad murmured. “Can I turn on the light? Or are you two going to do some more of your magic with invisible things?”
Grandma laughed. “You can turn it on,” she said.
It was a few seconds before I could open my eyes without it hurting. When I got down from the bed, my family positioned themselves in front of me. Grandma took my father by the hand. Grandpa put his arm around her. Mom stood beside him, holding my brother.
“So, do you want to go out?” Dad asked.
I looked at the wardrobe. I remembered the line of purple light that I’d seen at the top of the tunnel that led outside.
“I want to know what it’s like out there,” I answered.
My mother lowered her head. My brother stroked her face without much care. He kissed her cheek, covering her in drool.
